Columns

Marriage is tougher when it's 'for poorer'

By ROBYN BLUMNER
Published January 28, 2007

Marriage has been in the news lately for its scarcity. More than half of all women in our country are now sans spouse. It's enough to make a wedding planner sob into her taffeta.

This slow demise of marriage - down nearly 50 percent since 1970 - has a number of culprits. Americans are waiting longer to get hitched, are living together without benefit of marriage and, of course, are divorcing at a high rate.

This is old news. Mine the marriages statistics deeper, and you'll unearth a much more remarkable fact: Better-off couples are half as likely to divorce. Families with annual incomes over $50,000 have a 31 percent chance of divorce after 15 years, according to a study by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, whereas families with incomes below $25,000 have a 65 percent chance of divorce.

Income predicts divorce with great accuracy. The numbers suggest that a key variable in family stability is less cultural or sociological - less about personal values - than about basic economics.

It is hard to get along when you can't get by.

There are plenty of stresses that buffet a marriage, but facing more bills than income has to be among the most insidious. There are probably few things as humiliating and oppressive as working full time yet knowing there is no way your paycheck will provide for your family. It is not a feeling that working Americans in the 21st century should be subject to, yet we increasingly are.

The Bush administration has focused on marriage as an anti-poverty program, with the government directing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax money to help marriages flourish. I agree that healthy marriages should be encouraged. Married couples have higher incomes through their combined efforts, generally provide a better environment to raise children and bring wider social stability. But just teaching people conflict resolution and relationship skills is not addressing the elephant in the room.

You want healthy marriages? Then start reversing the growing income inequality and the you're-on-your-own economy that America has become.

You want healthy marriages? Then start with healthy people and make sure that no American is without affordable health care and no employee has to lose a day's pay when sick.

San Francisco is the first city in the country to require employers to provide paid sick leave, and you would think it was demanding gold-plated toilet seats at the loading dock bathroom.

The travesty here isn't old liberal San Francisco bilking business owners. It is that any employer today can actually get away with not providing their staff accrued sick pay. Are they kidding?

President Bush's idea to reduce the uninsured is a tax deduction for the purchase of private health insurance, a plan that would do virtually nothing for the lower-income uninsured. The president should get real. Shoring up families means universal health care.

You want healthy marriages? You want things to look more like the venerable 1950s, when people seemed calmer and more secure about their lives? Then return to defined benefit pensions. Today only about 21 percent of workers in the private sector enjoy this peace of mind. Instead, we have shifted the risk of retirement onto workers' shoulders. If you don't invest wisely in your 401(k) or if you didn't put enough of your income aside or if you outlive your nest egg, well thems the breaks.

If Bush had his way, even Social Security would lose its entitlement status and become an investment program fraught with personal risk.

You want healthy marriages? Then a $2-per-hour increase in the minimum wage won't cut it. We should figure out what constitutes a living wage and make that the floor.

In England, the minimum wage is $1,800 per month compared to our $824 for full-time work. The idea across the pond is that if an employer wants to monopolize the working time of an employee then that employee should be paid enough for a reasonable existence.

Marriages only have a chance when the people who are in them have a chance. The statistics couldn't be clearer: If the workplace provides men and women dignity and a semblance of economic security, it will translate into stability within the family.

If the Bush administration really wants to undergird the institution of marriage, then it should forget about sermons and lectures on personal virtue (the government's marriage programs are largely operated by faith-based institutions). Red states, which tend to be more avidly religious, have higher divorce rates than blue states. Whereas in low-divorce blue states, workers tend to have higher incomes. It's not a matter of values; it's a matter of value for one's labor.

Only by demanding that workers receive decent wages and benefits and only by becoming a more generous society to one another will the decline of marriage substantially slow. Everything else is just a diversion.

[Last modified January 27, 2007, 17:49:17]